Reading Lesson Plans: Teaching Key Details and Main Idea

It’s Day Six of Celebrate Reading Month! I’m a little delayed on Freebie Friday, so it’s a Freebie Saturday instead 🙂

If you’ve missed the previous posts, no problem! Fun activities, free stuff, and more are all yours by visiting THIS link. Definitely go check them out!

Today, we’re going to talk about teaching key details and main idea – something that can be a challenging to teach and learn. However, I think this series of lessons will break it down for you and give you practical strategies for teaching primary students about these reading components.

If you teach kindergarten or first grade, you must begin with the very basics – definitions and introductory language that builds their knowledge before they get deeper into discovering key details and the main idea for themselves. (*Spoiler Alert* Stay tuned because you can grab the lesson plans, definition poster, activity sheet, and exit slip for Activity 1 at the end of this post!)

In the first activity, you will teach students about details using bubblegum! They will learn a basic definition and spend time thinking about and examining the characteristics (details!) of bubblegum. You can also incorporate instruction about adjectives.

The second activities builds on the first one, and you’ll discuss why details are important in reading and where students can find them in children’s picture books.

The third activity is one of my favorites! Students get to practice their ability to pay attention to details with a game-like observation activity.

Activity Four is really fun, too! This is the lesson where students use details to help them visualize what they’re reading. The teacher will model drawing out a visualization based on a very simple description and then will give students the opportunity to illustrate a visualization to a detaileddescription to contrast the difference! This lesson carries nicely into writing, too!

Activity Five moves on to using key details to discover the main idea. Students will work in small groups using details in text and pictures to form the main idea.

Activity Six builds upon the previous lessons and gives students the opportunity to practice what they learned about details and main idea in the previous days’ lessons.

The last activity is fun, project-based summative assessment. Students will read a text, which can be chosen by the student or teacher, and the find key details that support the main idea. They’ll create a ‘key ring’ of details and the main idea as their assessment. SUPER FUN!

That’s it! Seven different activities that you can use to help teach your students in kindergarten, first grade, or second grade about the importance of and how to locate key details in order to find the main idea!

And, as promised, you can grab ACTIVITY 1 right now! Simply fill out the form at the bottom of this post.

If you’d like to have all the other activities pictured above, click the graphic below. PS. It’s ON SALE for a limited time! (If you’re reading from a blog reader, the links may not work, so type bit.ly/KeyDetails4u into your browser.)

Happy Teaching!

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Main Idea Sample ❤️

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These resources are great for kindergarten and first grade SHORT VOWEL instruction and intervention. Check them out for help with letter identification & recognition, sight words, reading practice and MORE!